Did you know optimizing your website for speed is the first step towards building an online presence than converts? Still, it’s amazing how many websites today are still taking forever to load in our browsers.
Each day, Google continues to advance and your competitors continue to get better. Therefore, you need to start optimizing your online presence and increase the quantity and quality of your traffic.
With that in mind, here’s why it’s crucial that your website loads in less than 2 seconds and the risks you may encounter if your website is too slow.
1. Not optimizing your website for speed could significantly decrease your rankings
Websites may take a while to load for a multitude of reasons, but not optimizing yours for speed may pose a risk. Not investing in speed optimization may lead to a significant decrease in rankings. The faster your website loads the more pages the search engines can crawl and index. However, if your website loads too slowly, the search engines can only crawl so much, as the allocated crawl budget is quite limited.
2. If your website takes forever to load, you risk being penalized by Google
On July 2018, Google officially announced site speed as a ranking factor for websites. The internet giant needs to keep the pace with the times, seeing how everyone today is in a hurry. Therefore, if your website loads too slowly, you risk being penalized by the search engines! In other words, the quicker your visitors will click away from your website, the quicker you’ll negatively affect your Ad Rank and indexation.
3. The longer your website takes to load, the more clients you stand to lose
The internet giant encourages website owners to think about how performance affects a user’s experience on their page. And it makes sense! The longer your website takes to load, the more users will become impatient and leave. In other words, you’re sending potential clients away to buy from your competition. The “Speed Update” may affect your SEO, but it may seriously affect you conversion rate as well.
4. Instead of building an awesome reputation, you’re putting yours at risk
People today love speed. We live life in the fast lane and don’t have the time to stand an wait too long for a website to load. Whether your users find your web pages on desktop or on their mobiles, it’s imperative that they load in 2 seconds or less. Otherwise, you’re really putting your reputation at risk as a business. Instead of potential clients converting and recommending your services & your products to others, they’ll run to the competition and promote your competitors instead.
5. By not optimizing your website for speed, you risk losing money
Last, but not least, another risk you may encounter if you “forget” to optimize your website for speed is losing money. A beautiful website can put a dent in your budget, but if no one is willing to wait for it to load, what’s the point? It’s important to invest in a beautiful website, but it’s equally important to make sure you optimize it for speed.
